Monday, August 16, 2010

Speaking of mirrors and sieves

I am no linguist. My language skills are very limited, although I do have a decent ear for tones which helps a lot. Nevertheless, I have been surrounded by other languages since I was a child. My mother grew up speaking Bangala and English, so there were bits of Bangala in her everyday speech. (Actually there still are - just the other day she designated me as a "fundi" or expert in a task.) By the time I was 5, we were posted in Ruanda-Urundi and then a year later, to Congo. Over the next 12 years we moved around in Congo, and also spent nearly a year in Switzerland. I acquired a decent proficiency in French, and a passing acquaintance with Lingala and Kikongo. When we returned to the States we lived in Hawaii for a while, and I learned some Hawaiian Pidgin. For the last 20 years my home has been Houston, where the West and East Texas variations mix with the soft Southern sounds to become the classic Texas drawl. Now I am married to an Italian and am once again learning a new language, and a new culture.

Living in all these various cultures with their varying languages has made me acutely aware of the relationship between the two. You cannot truly understand a culture without speaking its language. And, you cannot speak a language well without also learning the culture. The depth and texture and complexity of either is lost if you attempt to learn them in isolation.

5 comments:

You cannot truly understand a culture without speaking its language. And, you cannot speak a language well without also learning the culture. The depth and texture and complexity of either is lost if you attempt to learn them in isolation.

This is so very, very true. Even after 7 years of living here I am still learning the nuances of the italian language, of how a sentence spoken up north sounds so much different in the south, and how an expression uttered by friends in Sicily can go totally right over my head because I haven't a clue to their dialect.

Whenever I go back to the islands my friends always tell me that they detect a little bit of something different about me...must be the way I speak!

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About Me

I grew up mostly in Congo/Zaire, a child of missionaries. Lately I've been very interested in documenting my family history. I have a treasure-trove of family letters and photos, and will slowly be integrating those into posts.